PART 3 OF THANK-YOU SPEECH, SUSSEX UNIVERSITY

To my great surprise, the University of Sussex, where I spent 27 years
between 1964 and 1991 (except for a year in Edinburgh) decided to award
me an honorary degree of Doctor of Science in July 2006, along with
three other ex-Sussex people.

After the event I wrote out an expanded version of my 'thank-you' speech
and made it available here. The expanded version
included, as Part 3, a section explaining the dream some of us had in
the mid 1970s about what computing could do for education (not what
education could do for computing, which is what too many people think
about) and why that dream failed disastrously.

This file contains only that portion of the expanded speech. It is
Part 3 of the whole document..

Our vision for computing in education.

During the early 1970s some of us, especially
Max Clowes
and I, partly inspired by the work of John Holt, Ivan Illich and Seymour Papert,
developed a vision of the future of computing in education, which I summarised
in the Preface to my 1978 book
The Computer Revolution in Philosophy, as follows:

Another book on how computers are going to change our
lives? Yes, but this is more about computing than about
computers, and it is more about how our thoughts may be
changed than about how housework and factory chores will
be taken over by a new breed of slaves.

Thoughts can be changed in many ways. The invention of
painting and drawing permitted new thoughts in the processes of
creating and interpreting pictures. The invention of
speaking and writing also permitted profound extensions of
our abilities to think and communicate. Computing is a bit
like the invention of paper (a new medium of expression) and
the invention of writing (new symbolisms to be embedded in
the medium) combined. But the writing is more important
than the paper. And computing is more important than computers:
programming languages, computational theories and
concepts -- these are what computing is about, not transistors,
logic gates or flashing lights. Computers are pieces of machinery
which permit the development of computing as pencil
and paper permit the development of writing. In both
cases the physical form of the medium used is not very
important, provided that it can perform the required
functions.

Computing can change our ways of thinking about many
things, mathematics, biology, engineering, administrative procedures,
and many more. But my main concern is that it can
change our thinking about ourselves: giving us new models,
metaphors, and other thinking tools to aid our efforts to
fathom the mysteries of the human mind and heart. The
new discipline of Artificial Intelligence is the branch of computing
most directly concerned with this revolution. By giving
us new, deeper, insights into some of our inner processes, it
changes our thinking about ourselves. It therefore changes
some of our inner processes, and so changes what we are, like
all social, technological and intellectual revolutions.

This sort of vision led us to develop new kinds of teaching
that allowed students to explore ways of giving computers human-like
capabilities in order to deepen their understanding of those
capabilities and in order to teach them to think creatively and
analytically about complex structures and processes and how they
interact. Our work led to the development of
the Poplog system
a multi-language development environment for teaching and research,
whose successful marketing helped to fund the growth of COGS in the
early years (thanks to the genius of its chief architect, John Gibson,
building on earlier work by Steve Hardy and Chris Mellish).

[Note added 11 Aug 2006:
A summary of some of what we did to support
student-driven learning first in the Pop-11 system then later in Poplog
is now available
here as part of a contribution to opposition to patents for
ideas about e-learning.

The teaching and research tools we developed are now freely available
online at the
Free Poplog
web site. Now, as then, they can be used to help
many people, including school children, learn to design,
implement, test. debug, analyse, explain, compare and criticise, working
systems, instead of merely copying and rearranging what others have
created, which is what many people use computers for.

This new mode of education also began to flourish in some schools with
the spread of BBC micros. Many highly creative teachers inspired new
adventurous and disciplined forms of learning in their pupils -- though
many teachers had no idea what to do with computers because they had no
suitable training.

ALAS THE DREAM COLLAPSED.
Politicians, parents, school teachers, and industrialists all started
claiming that computers should be used to teach schoolkids how to use
the tools that were being used in industry. This was a world-wide folly.

So instead of learning how to THINK, children all round the world now
use the potentially most powerful educational medium that has ever
existed merely for the mundane task of learning how to USE the packages
that run on Windows on a PC, such as word processors, browsers, email
tools, databases and spread sheets --- most of which will be out of date
by the time their own careers are launched.

As a result many intelligent school leavers who have never encountered
programming or artificial intelligence now don't see how computing could
possibly be a university degree subject: they think it's like cooking --
you learn to use a computer as you learn to use an oven. I hope to show
how wrong that is. But it will not be easy. Most people are now
brainwashed into thinking that a computer by definition comes with
Microsoft windows on it and the idea that people, including people like
them, can actually design and modify the tools and packages that run on
computers never enters their heads.

I was intrigued to hear a senior Microsoft person on the radio a couple
of weeks ago lamenting the fact that there are so few people coming out
of schools wanting to study computing, because they think it is cool
to use computer systems but don't realise it is cool to create new ones.
He claimed this was seriously damaging the economy. He did not mention
why this is happening.

If some of the people now graduating can be made to understand this
message, then perhaps when they are teachers or politicians or parents
they will not make the same drastic mistake as was made by the previous
generation.

Alas, this may now be irreversible, world wide: a great tragedy
of our time. Even if politicians recognize the mistake, it will take
decades to produce enough teachers who have the competence to teach
people to create working systems instead of merely using them.

I have one small hope regarding a way of reversing this trend. If it
makes progress I'll add a note here later. But I am not very hopeful.

I've elaborated a little on these points in a paper for a conference on
Grand Challenges in Computing Education in 2004. The paper is
here.